There are some voices that you immediately trust and leave you with a warm glow.
One of these belongs to Jeb Loy Nichols, whose smooth, sensuous delivery is reassuring even when he sings of feeling apathetic, lost, lonely and melancholic.
I confess that he had not previously crossed my radar but backtracking shows that the strength of the material on this mini-album is no one-off.
Available on limited 10” vinyl, the six tracks were recorded as part of the sessions for his forthcoming full-album, The Country Hustle, which will be his tenth.
It comes immersed in a wintry mood as foretold by two track titles :Seven Days In December and Wintering Of The Year. Yet despite the bleakness of the season, these are not the woes of a man who has given up all hope.
Brokenhearted he may be, but certainly he is far from broken.
In Regret his viewpoint is entirely at odds with Edith Piaf's 'Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien'. There is a certain black humour in the three regrets he lists: "everything I've done, everything I'm doing and what I haven't done yet" and being set to funky beat helps lift any sense of total despair.
The situation he recounts in That’s How We’re Living is similarly desperate as he describes a decrepit home, the failure to find gainful employment and includes a Morrissey-like lament: "I never go out because I got nowhere to go".
With a similar 'heaven knows I'm miserable now' air, the title of Pretty Lonesome is self explanatory in a song set to a tune that closely resembles Katie Cruel.
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The only weak link is My Mistake which seems more of a stub of a song than a fully realised piece.
In his online bio, Nichols says that seeing the Sex Pistols changed his world-view but aside perhaps from a defiantly individualistic spirit, there's no hint of a punk aesthetic in tunes that combine the old-timey traditions of 'race music' with the white man's blues of country soul.
While he adopts the air of a man down on his luck, Nichols seems to have his real life pretty well sorted out. He was born in Missouri and has lived in Texas and New York, but now resides in a smallholding in rural Wales where he produces art prints, writes, makes music and plants trees.
He may have his tongue in his cheek when he introduces himself on his website as "country soul brother number one" but you can't blame him for wanting to blow his own trumpet.
If we weren't living in such a mean old world, music of this high quality would have a made him a star many times over by now.
Jeb Loy Nichols's website
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